SUNKEN GOLD

Wairarapa Times-Age, 13 October 1939, Page 6

SUNKEN GOLD

BRIGANTINE TELEMAQUE’S CARGO. LOST IN SEINE ESTUARY. The recovery of sunken treasure from the sea is an enterprise which has always had a romantic attraction, both for those who attempt it and for those who read about it. It is exciting news that the searchers who have for months been trying to locate the wreck of the 130-ton brigantine Telemaque and her reputedly valuable cargo imagine that they are on the eve of success, writes the Paris correspondent of a London weekly. The Telemaque sailed, from Rouen on January 1, 1790, bound for London and carrying what. was officially described as baulks of wood and barrels of tar. But, according to legend, there were jewels, gold and silver plate, and coins to a fabulous amount concealed in the logs and below the false bottoms of the barrels. They were riches which part of the French aristocracy and the Catholic Church were trying to smuggle out of the country in order to escape the confiscations of the Revolution. They included not only priceless chalices and other sacred and secular vessels from the rich abbeys of Jumieges and Saint Martin de Bischerville, the ruins of whose splendid Norman churches are still a feature of the Seine valley in the great loops of the river between Rouen and the sea, but also a sum of money belonging to Louis XVI, and supposed to have been as much as two and a-half millions of “livres” —which were not English pounds, but francs —and necklaces belonging to Queen Marie Antoinette, and said to have been worth a million and a half.

For nearly a hundred and fifty years the Telemaque has been lying in the mud and the shingle just off Quillebeuf, the last town on the already widened Seine before it spreads out into the estuary. She anchored there on the evening of her departure in order to await the tide and avoid the current, which were even more dangerous then than now; but in the middle of the night she broke away and her captain and ten of her crew only just had time to escape in a boat before she was caught in a whirlpool and thrown against the shoal, where she foundered.

At least twenty boats have gone down at about, the same place since that, time, which makes it difficult to be sure that the right wreck has been identified. But the divers are confident that they have reached their goal, and that when they can set to work again shortly, after the spring tides, which make that wonderful tidal wave, or ''mascaret,’’ so well known to tourists at this season, they will penetrate into the hull and begin to bring up something more valuable than the few timbers which is all they have to show at present. Theirs will be the fourth attempt to recover the treasure. The first was made by the Government of the restored Bourbons in 1818, and the second and third, in 1837 and 1842, by two different engineers belonging to ,Le Havre, the great seaport at the mouth of the estauary, on the other side.